Michael White was voted Britain’s least boring music critic by listeners of Classic FM. He has made documentaries about Menotti, Britten and Nielsen and once attempted to explain Wagner's Ring Cycle on TV in half an hour. He's the author of two books: Introducing Wagner (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (HarperCollins).

The Garden that Sank – but not so deep as you've been told: some thoughts on Michel van der Aa's new opera

Michel van der Aa’s new Sunken Garden is in every sense a mystery opera, and part of the mystery is why ENO – who have been producing the piece, albeit at the Barbican – decided to take it on in the first place. For a chamber score with just five singers, it required a certain stage extravagance. The high-technology involved, with massive screen projections in 3D (for which the audience are issued viewing glasses) must have cost a tidy sum. And it’s more packaging than substance.

But that said, I don’t think it deserved quite the degree of opprobrium that some of my colleagues in the music press were busy heaping on it last week. The composer, van de Aa, is fashionable, Dutch, and one of the more recent great white hopes for opera in that his music joins the old world of classical formalities with the new of techno-saturated, radical-chic clubland – and has done so with conspicuous successes in the past. A polymath whose background is in sound engineering and film-making as well as the actual writing of notes, he crosses territories and genres with apparent ease; and normally his theatre-pieces are entirely his own work. Direction, text and all.

But for Sunken Garden he’s collaborated with the writer David Mitchell, famous for his novel-turned-into-a-film Cloud Atlas. And between them they’ve cobbled together a story of a video artist who gets drawn into what starts like a whodunnit but becomes a piece of occult sci-fi about lost souls trapped in limbo between life and death – where they are spiritually blood-sucked by a sorceress posing as a patron of the arts.

Anyone involved in arts funding will know the type and may find some point of connection with this narrative. And though it’s complicated, it’s no worse than you get in an average Handel opera: so that, for me, isn’t the problem. The problem is that the story is so poorly plotted it goes nowhere, collapsing in on itself when the composer and librettist seem to raise their hands in surrender and admit: we don’t know where to take this.

Up to then, the pace is slow and rambling. The singers are under-directed and given nothing useful to do. The onstage energy soon flags. And the artist’s videos (which we see in mid-creation) are breathtakingly banal: of interest only to the extent that they feature some of the hammiest acting ever seen on a professional stage.

BUT … the presentation of the limbo world (the ‘sunken garden’) as a 3D video projection is enjoyable. And though the hi-tech trickery of three live singers (artist, sorceress, and someone whose role I didn’t understand) interacting with two pre-recorded human holograms (the lost souls) is hit and miss, it’s good when it works. As is the score which, for all its clubland chic, is really modern romantic, with the slow-burn spangled glamour of early John Adams. It’s not good at characterisation, at development, or at signalling the information in the story that you need to know. But it has a certain beauty, which Roderick Williams in the lead role of the artist realises well. And it’s accessible, with an appeal (I’m sure) to younger audiences who wouldn’t normally be seen in opera houses. That, I guess, is why it’s been playing at the Barbican and not the Coliseum. And any effort along those lines is worth trying.